


your shadow at the edge of things

by Nakimochiku



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 20:42:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29088525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nakimochiku/pseuds/Nakimochiku
Summary: Dean Winchester Jr arranges his father's funeral, and contemplates the shadow of the uncle he never met.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 43





	your shadow at the edge of things

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so on one hand i, freaking, hated????? the end of SPN but on the other hand i was straight bawling for 42 minutes so i guess it did it's job right? and i decided fuck it. I wanna write about Dean Winchester Jr. WHY THE FUCK DID SAM NAME HIS SON DEAN HOW DARE HE BREAK MY HEART LIKE THIS. anyway i made MYSELF cry writing this so. have fun?????

I.

When Dean's father dies at 87, he leaves him with four precious heirlooms: an antique car, a journal penned by three different hands, a key to a secret society’s hide out that should only be used in dire circumstances, and a guardian angel. 

Dean isn't as sentimental about the car as his father was. He's never heard it roar down black country pavement and open highways, a big black beast gobbling up the road, the way Dad described, rock music blaring, blue sky arching up and overhead, freedom and adventure stretching out before its tires. He considers selling it. 

He traces SW and DW on the back door with his fingers and wonders who the fuck he’s kidding. 

He sits inside it for a while, flipping through John Winchester’s Journal. There's a family photo tucked into the jacket, a beautiful blonde woman, a square jawed and handsome man, and two small children, dated august, 1983. He keeps flipping. He can tell the difference between each story teller, the biographical nature of his grandfather's faded scrawl. The detailed narrative of his father’s even neater cursive. The curt facts of his uncle’s perfunctory chicken scratch. 

Other families pass down china sets, first edition novels, hand carved furniture and jewellery. his family has passed a journal from his great grandfather, down to him. Dean snorts. This is the measure of their history. 

II.

When Dad was first set up for home care, weak from his stroke, he’d taken Dean by the hand and pulled him in to whisper, “Give me a hunter's funeral.”

“Of course, Dad, of course,” Dean assures, and Dad’s hands had felt so frail and paper thin beneath his fingers. He remembers those hands, strong, sure and firm on the handles of machetes, on the spines of books, on his hand helping him learn how to grip a pen. 

Dad says, “The ashes. Spread the ashes—“ he's too tired to finish the sentence. Dean rests his forehead against his father’s wasted shoulder, once muscular and broad, the shoulders he used to swing from. He already knows where Dad wants the ashes to be spread.

“Of course, Dad. Of course.”

III.

Uncle Dean’s shadow has loomed over the house all their lives. If Dean didn't know better, he’d say his ghost followed them into rooms, trailed his fingers over the kitchen counters, laughed between breaths in the silent chambers of the night. But Dean does know better. 

Uncle Dean’s photograph is on the mantel, faded with age. The frame is worn by a thumb print from being picked up repeatedly. Dean’s finger slots into the same thumbprint now. It's the only decent picture they have of Uncle Dean as an adult, a candid taken when they weren't looking. His dad’s barely out of his twenties, and Uncle Dean grins at him, broad and sparkling. He's handsome, broad shouldered. He looks fun, larger than life, large enough to be the shadow that trails him now. 

When Dean was younger, and Dad wasn't half as good at packing away his grief, he used to imagine what life would be like with Uncle Dean around. He’d have someone to sneak him his first sip of beer. Someone to call for advice with dating. Someone to tease Dad with about his latest research project. He feels Uncle Dean there, on the edge of hunter's gatherings, and in the corner of family barbeques. 

When Dean got older, and started to look less like Mom, more like Dad, more like Grandpa John, more like Uncle Dean, he struggled under the yoke of it. Maybe if Uncle Dean were around, he thought viciously, he wouldn't feel the crush of his Dad’s expectations as he learns to shoot (Dean could get a bullseye from that distance by eight, son), that gentle reminder he is not that man laughing brightly in the only photograph of him. If Uncle Dean were around, and not some pall to settle over their lives, cobwebs and mists far thicker than memories, maybe Dean wouldn't be some pale replacement for his Dad to hug lingeringly and say “getting there, kiddo,” measured against Uncle Dean’s brightness and found lacking. 

As an adult, sifting through the detritus of Dad’s life, the stack of family photos shoved in the back of an heirloom journal, Dean can see the empty places where Uncle Dean might have fit. Someone to ruffle Dad’s hair. Someone for Dad to turn to and laugh. Someone to always have his back in a hunt. Someone to just say “Sammy,” like it meant everything, rolled up into a couple syllables and a tone of voice. Now, Dean can see the hollow place beside Dad, where Uncle Dean was always supposed to slot back into place, like Dean’s thumb on the picture frame. 

“I named you,” Dad said once, with his hand on his shoulder and a miserable gleam in his eye. “After the greatest hunter I've ever known.”

He feels the long long stretch of his shadow wherever he goes. 

IV.

Aunt Claire’s hair tumbles down her back in silver gold curls. She wears too much leather for a woman in her sixties, and she barely comes up to his chest when she hugs him tight. She smells like wine and perfume and cookies. She used to smell like gunpowder and whiskey and blood. 

Her quartet are some of the only hunters from Dad’s generation still alive. Aunt Claire laughs and says “That's cause woman hunters have the good goddamn sense to know when it's time to hang it up, and it's always before arthritis makes climbing up stairs hard.” Aunt Kaia bumps her with her hip and says if the other three hadn’t urged her, Aunt Claire would still be chasing creepy crawlies across the midwest. “Yeah, but I'm not, am I? So. Good. Goddamn. Sense.”

Next comes Garth. At 81, he's the oldest hunter there that remembers. “Sam was one of the best,” he says cheerfully, enveloping Dean in a huge hug. “Big shoes to fill, Dean.”

Garth’s sons, Castiel and Sam, give their condolences with a lot of back patting and nodding. They are only five or so years older than him, he grew up play fighting them in the yard, being teased because they were bigger than him, until he hit fifteen and out stripped them with ease. Dean thinks it's strange that they complete a little set, history repeating itself. 

“And Uncle Dean?”

Garth pauses. He looks wistful, like he hasn't thought of that name in years. Like Uncle Dean's shadow isn't looming near the tequila even now. “Your Uncle Dean was... Well he was something else.”

Somehow, the wake becomes stories of the Winchester Brothers, big and bad in their classic car, always good in a fight, always ready to throw down with demons and dangers, monsters and gods, legendary. 

It's different to hear it in Garth’s voice, in Aunt Claire's voice, than to hear it in the humble tones of his dad. His dad made these legends seem commonplace. No big deal, just a century spent in hell, a couple of averted apocalypses, dimension hopping through time and space. The others make it extraordinary. 

Big shoes, Dean thinks again hollowly, listening to hunters talk and laugh and reminiscence the falling of a titan. Big shoes.

V.

Dean stands on the porch, and for a moment he’s alone. Just him and the shadow of Uncle Dean, leaning against the porch railing, sipping a whiskey, grinning as cheekily as he had in his twenties. He wonders if Dad got swallowed up in this shadow too, if Dad could never pack his grief away because like an idiot he named his son after the one person he missed more than words could convey, the person he’d always been willing to die for, the person he struggled to live for. 

Then he's not alone, with a whisper of air and a flap of wings. 

“Dean.” Castiel says gravely. He's the patron angel of bar brawls and knife fights, of hunters and bad blood and haunted highways. He hasn't changed at all in all the decades Dean has known him. The same blue eyes, messy hair, trenchcoat. His heirloom guardian angel, passed from his uncle to his father with a promise, and now to him out of obligation. 

“He in heaven?” Dean asks. His voice is thicker than he intends, and he tries to swallow down the threat of tears. 

“They’re together.” Castiel answers. 

He wonders if Castiel sees traces of Uncle Dean in his face, but his hair is too brown and his eyes are too muddy and his jaw isn't nearly as square. He wonders if he can see traces of Uncle Dean at a molecular level. See traces of him on Dean’s soul. He wonders if he sees Dean’s shadow in the corner, the crinkle of green eyes and the flash of straight white teeth. 

“You can head in if you want. Say hi to everyone.” Dean says, jerking a thumb at the door behind him where the party rages on. 

Castiel just shakes his head. “I'll greet them soon enough. You’re the one who needs me now.”

“It's not— I—,” Dean swallows, rubs a hand over his face and tries again. “Dad’s in a better place. He’s with— He’s better.”

Castiel tips his head to observe him. The moment drags too long, almost into the realm of awkward, before he says, “Maybe. But he’s not here.” It takes everything Dean has not to burst into tears, big ugly sobs because he misses his Dad. He doesn't miss Sam Winchester, slayer of the devil, of gods, of death itself, the best hunter to have ever lived. He misses his dad, the folklore professor, in his bland cardigans, with his reading glasses and his bad taste in hair metal and his great cups of coffee and his frankly shitty casseroles. Castiel rests a hand on his trembling shoulder. He gets it, the way everyone laughing inside hasn't yet. “I will be.” He says. “When you ask, I will be here.”

“Cause you promised Dad?” Dean asks, shakily, too bitterly. 

“Because you are a Winchester.” Castiel says firmly. That means a lot, means more than it should. “And that means I’ll watch over you.” He tries to smile, still so stiff and awkward after all these years, a lifetime with the Winchester Brothers showing him what it means to be human. “In the meantime, I know this won't crush you, Dean.”

“Because I'm a Winchester?” Dean tries with a crooked smile. Over his shoulder, Uncle Dean’s shadow raises a glass, laughs, and dissipates like so much dust, folded like the leather jacket in the trunk of that big black antique car, put away with orange peels and lavender buds. 

Castiel nods, squeezing his shoulder affectionately. “You Winchesters are made of strong stuff.”

Dean nods. Uncle Dean’s shadow has already faded, leaves the taste of whiskey and leather and gasoline in his mouth, but none of the bitterness. He wraps his arm around Castiel’s shoulder and hauls him inside. “Come on. Come say hi to everyone. And when you get back…” He smiles. “Tell Uncle Dean I’ll meet him when I’m good and ready.” He’ll fill the big shoes of two titans, until that long shadow flinches at the sight of him, and the sounds of his name.


End file.
